What an achievement! In 2012, HKUST will have the highest number of newly elected Fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) among universities and institutions in Asia . It will also bring the HKUST Engineering School ‘s total number of IEEE Fellows to 25.

The IEEE is the world’s leading professional association for advancing technology for humanity and has 395,000 members in more than 160 countries. Fellowship is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as an honor only given to a select group of members with extraordinary accomplishments in their fields. The six newly elevated professors from the HKUST School of Engineering are:

Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering

Prof Oscar Au , cited for his contributions to multimedia coding and security. His fast motion estimation algorithms were accepted into the ISO/IEC 14496-7 MPEG-4 international video coding standard and the China AVS -M standard, and he holds eight US patents on his signal processing techniques.

Prof Roger Cheng , elected for work on multi-user communications in wireless systems. He was the recipient of the Meitec Junior Fellowship Award from the Meitec Corporation in Japan , the George Van Ness Lothrop Fellowship from the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University , and the Research Initiation Award from the US National Science Foundation.

Prof Vincent Lau , recognized for his input into wireless communication systems with channel feedback. He founded the Huawei HKUST Innovation Laboratory and holds 28 US patents on various advanced wireless technologies and is the key contributor of four IEEE 802.22 (cognitive radio) specifications.

Prof Johnny Sin , cited for work on the design and commercialization of power semiconductor devices. He is the Director of HKUST’s Nanoelectronics Fabrication Facility and Semiconductor Product Analysis and Design Enhancement (SPADE) Center. Prof Sin is the holder of 12 patents, and his power semiconductor devices design has been widely used in home appliances, portable electronic products, mobiles and automotive equipment.

Prof Danny Tsang , elected for contributions to optimization of communications networks. During leave from HKUST in 2000/2001, Prof Tsang assumed the role of Principal Architect at Sycamore Networks in the US and invented the 64B/65B encoding that has now been adopted by International Telecommunication Union’s Generic Framing Procedure recommendation GFP-T (ITU-T G.7041/Y.1303). Prof Tsang has been awarded three US patents and one Chinese patent.

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Prof Qian Zhang, honored for work on the mobility and spectrum management of wireless networks and mobile communications. Prof Zhang serves as Director of HKUST’s Digital Life Research Center . She is the inventor of about 30 international patents. She has received an MIT Technology Review World’s Top Young Innovator Award and an Overseas Young Investigator Award from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, among others.